The Toe Jam Puppet Band is a children's entertainment group from New Bedford, Massachusetts. They perform throughout New England several times per week, including every Monday at Buttonwood Park Zoo in New Bedford, and played 270 times in 2007 across Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine and New York City. Band members include co-founders Tom Poitras and Vinny Lovegrove,. The band formed in 2001 after Poitras, previously a punk rock singer with The Gluons, began writing songs for his newborn son, met Lovegrove who had been entertaining folk since 1994 with his Miracle Fish Puppet Theater. Their first CD, titled First CD, sold over 1000 copies. They released a second album, Toe Jam Dance Party, in 2003, and a third, Toe Jam in Outer Space, in 2008.
They have received a grant from the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children for their Creative Arts Playgroup, and proceeds from the sale of their first CD went to the MSPCC.
According to the Boston Globe, they are "blazing a path through the world of family entertainment". WickedLocal said they offer "a special brand of hands-on children’s entertainment that grown-ups can actually enjoy". The Providence Journal noted that "The kids' involvement steers each show, so every performance is different."
Famous quotes containing the words toe, jam, puppet and/or band:
“The real American type can never be a ballet dancer. The legs are too long, the body too supple and the spirit too free for this school of affected grace and toe walking.”
—Isadora Duncan (1878–1927)
“We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn’t just ours—it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can’t beat it.”
—Greil Marcus (b. 1945)
“The pretty fellows you speak of, I own entertain me sometimes, but is it impossible to be diverted with what one despises? I can laugh at a puppet show, at the same time I know there is nothing in it worth my attention or regard.”
—Mary Wortley, Lady Montagu (1689–1762)
“Nothing makes a man feel older than to hear a band coming up the street and not to have the impulse to rush downstairs and out on to the sidewalk.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)